Poetry, Art, Medicine & Society

In The Voice Of A Minor Saint

Sarah J. Sloat grew up in New Jersey and has lived in China, Kansas, and Italy. For the past 16 years she has resided in Frankfurt, Germany, where she works as an editor for a news agency. Her poems have appeared in West Branch, Juked, Yemassee, Front Porch, and Barrelhouse, among other journals. In The Voice Of A Minor Saint, published by Tilt Press, is her first chapbook or book-length publication, white and saddle stitched with attractive cover art by Emmanuel Polanco.

The title, shared by a poem in the book, came across as witty self-reference from a writer who sees herself as still emerging and thus less considered, but perhaps still speaking in a voice as yet uncompromised by the temptations which accompany establishment. Sloat also suggests that one tends to find sacraments among the mundane and overlooked, so that the poet with accurate vision commits her artistic life to dwelling on them:

I keep my hair close cropped
that my face might fit in lockets.

My heart is small, like a love
of buttons or black pepper.

On approach, I notice how
objects grow and contours blear.

That’s what comes of nearness.
I have an ear for the specific…”

(from “In the Voice of a Minor Saint”)

True to this faith in minor things, much of Sloat’s verse concentrates on moments not charged by love or death. She doesn’t confront us with the inner workings of affliction, the aftermath of passion; she gives us bad hair days:

…Console
yourself: at least the trees
put up their parasols; at least
the orchards you wear as hair
surrender those damn apples.

(from “Humidity”)

Nonetheless one is drawn in by the insinuations, the suburban street that leads finally to mortal decline. The sedulously observed trifle becomes a door to the abyss in everyday predicaments:

World, I forgive the lack of focus.
I know the knob of sun will turn;
even here, I trust clarity
to honor our appointment.

(from “Humidity”)

While Sloat discovers her inspiration in the ordinary, the poem that results is rarely ordinary. Her poems thrive on repetitive examination the way one might turn an object over in one’s hands and expose different facets. Despite this approach, her work is seldom wordy, conjuring like an origami maker a great deal from the plain with a few twists of phrase:

In the folds where I am rolled,
some mornings I have seen the Andes,

strands of wax, and in the stitches
once I made out a line of ants
carrying their minute burdens.

Everything that appears possible
can be turned into something impossible.

(from “Curtains”)

The greater traumas reside in her verse too, subtly implicit, in the underbrush or around a curve, though still available. Take for instance the sly and masterful “God Have Pity on the Smell of Gasoline,” where through a kind of abstract metonym the manmade becomes trope for the man, who is in need of absolution. Here the volatile, the tactile in an unpopulated scene leads by the trail of that nauseating vapor back to a past contaminated by the residue of burning. The scent of gasoline is urgency itself, the threat of conflagration, a flash of self-immolation. Here is the oxidized, polluted world the car has created. Here is napalm:

…God pity the vapors lifting
through the pores of the soil,
loitering near the pumps,

soot that films hair and coats,
that beds in collars,
dark groom of velocity…

Mostly though, Sloat’s poetry avoids indictment, focuses less on relationships and more on self-awareness in time and place. When she puts aside the magnifying glass and picks up the mirror, the effect she achieves remains that of the reserved witness, of testimony distilled until subjective response becomes solemn, persuasive as facts:
I weary of the season, whitewash
and blind arrows

The sun has come to steal my outline,
come to sort me,
stretch me along its javelin.

Succumb, it says when
already the heat is lurching south
in one long exhalation.

(From “Summer’s End”)

Sloat relies more on her supple voice and impressionistic shifts in image and line structure than on traditional prosody. Nevertheless she titrates into this collection occasional poems that exploit more formal techniques without any trace of discord. I would judge both ghazals she includes in the chapbook’s twenty-two poems as worthy representatives of her fine idiosyncrasies as a writer and of ghazals in general, my limitation to English (and rusty Spanish) notwithstanding.

As with any volume, there are stronger poems and weaker ones. On occasion, Sloat pursues the banal and doesn’t find much more. But overall, I found In the Voice of a Minor Saint to be compelling and taut. Its sequence consistently uncovers natural synergies. Nothing here feels out of place or jarring in tone or theme. Sloat abstains from approaches that tend to provide for easy access, seldom relying on narrative, and preferring vestal meditation to jocular monologue, and so for the most part her ideas refuse to yield nutmeat to a cursory skim. Yet in the end the work is highly readable, a simple though hardly trivial measure of quality. These are poems one wishes to finish, and the same can be said for the book as well.

—David Moolten

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David Moolten

About me: I'm the author of three books of poetry, Plums & Ashes (Northeastern University, 1994), which won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, Especially Then (David Robert Books, 2005), and Primitive Mood, which won the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press, and was published in 2009.

I'm also a physician specializing in transfusion medicine, and I live, write and practice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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Audio Files

'Cuda(Originally appeared in The Kenyon Review)

Ode For Orville And Wilbur Wright(Originally appeared in The Southern Review)

Ode For Orville And Wilbur Wright

I don't yearn for their steep excursion
Into fame and fortune, for it had
The usual price, and Orville died bitter
And Wilbur died young. I envy them
Only the slender and empty distance they left
Between them and a seaside's grassy bluffs
In mild December, the frail ingenuity
Of dreams, a lifetime's hopes made of string and cloth
And a little puttering motor that might have run
A lawn mower if the brothers had put their minds
To one first. For dumb exhilaration, nothing --
Not an F-16 thundering from its base
In Turkey nor my redeye circling O'Hare --
Comes close to what they must have felt
For less than a shaking, clattering minute
Clearing all attachment to the world
Of dickering and petty concerns: for some
No other heaven. So I take note of them
As they took notes from the lonely buzzard, obsessed
To the point of love with the ghostly air
And the small fluttering things that wandered
Through it. Eccentric but never flighty,
Bookish but not above nicking their hands
In bicycle shops and basements, they lived
With their sister and tinkered with the future.
Propelled by ambition, the mandate
It invents, they still heeded the laws
Of nature, trimmed needless weight, saw everything
Even themselves as burden, determined
Not to crash and burn. Sheer will launched them,
Good will, because those first forty yards
Skimming shale and reeds were for everyone.
Face down between the struts, staring at the ground
As it blurred past, they failed like anyone
To grasp the implications. But legs flailing
They hung on, buoyed by never and almost
And then just barely. I could do worse
Than their brief rapture, their common sense
Of purpose. Or I could, if only
For a moment, exalt them, go along
With the jury-rigged myth, the quaint
Contrivance that lets them rise above it all.

In a small off-Broadway theatre in NYC, it’s opening night for a new play, The Absolutely, Positively, Forget About it, Last Night at Von Dahm’s Sports Bar, Wing Hut and Karaoke Palace. The actors run through their lines one last time before heading to wardrobe, the props are on set, the music and lighting are […]

Dr P. Ravi Shankar has been facilitating medical humanities sessions for over eight years, first in Nepal and currently in Aruba in the Dutch Caribbean. He has a keen interest in and has written extensively on the subject. He has previously written several pieces for the Literature, Arts, and Medicine blog. I have always enjoyed […]

about.me

Head & Feet In The Clouds

O.k. so here goes. I'm a poet, a very fledgling filmmaker, and a doctor, pretty much in that order (except when it comes to keeping the lights on).

My most recent book of verse, Primitive Mood, won the T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press and was published in 2009. I also have two previous books, Plums & Ashes (Northeastern University, 1994), which won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, and Especially Then (David Robert Books, 2005). My poems have appeared in magazines too (such as Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southwest Review, and Epoch, among others). Last but not least, I've had the good luck to see work in anthologies, including a Pushcart Prize.

The movie list is short, though I hope to make it longer...I've finished one: "Astronaut Goes From Migrant Fields To Outer Space," a short film featuring video, animation, and spoken word, which screened nationally at festivals.

My medical specialty is transfusion medicine, which means I'm an expert on the collection, storage and use of blood (and associated therapies and technologies) for patient care.